Adventures of a Yaadie in North Carolina

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Monthly Archives: June 2015

Welcome to my first post in my “Yes Grandma” feature. Growing up, the adults around me often said things that made me say “Huh?” but there was also a hidden lesson. Now it’s my turn to share them with you guys.

The first saying I’m going to share is in Jamaican Patois:

Deaf ears gi liad trouble!

Translation: Deaf ears will give a liar trouble.

Meaning: to be honest, I can’t give an oxford dictionary translation for this one but my mom always says it when I mishear a part of a story. So because I wasn’t listening or paying attention (deaf ears) when I pass on the story to someone else, the information will lose it’s essence or meaning entirely, putting the original storyteller ( the liar… or truther? who knows really?) in trouble.

Because I’ve been doing such a wonderful job with my other blog features (please note the sarcasm) I’ve decided to add another one… or two.

In the first one I’ll take a proverb, quote, idiom, saying or whatever and give my interpretation and maybe even share a story or two on how it had an impact on me. This will hopefully provide an avenue to share more about my culture, which is, after all, what KultureShocked is about. I would like to start this today and diligently follow through on the Tuesdays to follow (speaking it into being).

The second feature will be my take on one of the daily posts from the week before. I’m not sure when I’ll start this yet.

So I wrote this the Thursday before last Thursday amd just realised it was still in my drafts… sigh.

With work and all the punches life has to throw at us it’s very easy to become a zombie. What you, my lovely and hopefully forgiving readers, needed to know this week… and last week… is it’s important to make time to live. If that means typing at your computer with one eye open even after your tenth cup of coffee at 9am then so be it.
Go out on a weeknight and don’t let The Man tell you otherwise!

I was flipping through an old book and I found one of, if not the, first poem I had ever written. My parents and I got in a fight and I put pencil to paper and dealt with it the best way I could.
The message you all need to get you through the rest of the week is : ” The pen is stronger than the knife”. I first heard this quote in the Damien Marley song “It was Written” (feel free to go look for it on YouTube) and my boss said the original quote/proverb today and I knew I had to write about it.

Parents

There is a war going on in my mind.
A war between
What is wrong
And what is right.
A war between
What I want
And what they want
for me.
And try as I might
I can’t seem to find
A way to emerge from the
Crossfire unharmed.

See I have a sharp tongue
I can build you up
and I can cut you down
But they have something more
-experience.
So I bite the bullet because
I realise I’ve brought
A knife to a gunfight
And try as I might,
I cannot seem to find
A way to emerge from
The crossfire unharmed.

Impossible to emerge unscathed.
And deep down I know they were right all along.
But I can now look back at
the missed shots, back to the
Drawing board, revisit and re-equip
The artillery.
Next time, I’ll have experience.

Isn’t it funny how the best ideas come to us at 4 in the morning when we’re too wide awake to be sleepy and too sleepy to be wide awake. Then, we know we should get up and write it down but the Voice of Laziness manages to convince you that we’ll remember everything in detail when we wake up for real in the morning. Wrong. But it happens every time and good ideas fade into nothingness. Womp :(. Maybe they’ll come back to us someday.

I was at work today either working hard or hardly working – you decide ;)- and I had this thought. I work from 8-5 then I get home, eat dinner and fall asleep shortly thereafter. The cycle repeats itself for four more days.
I sit at a desk for 8 hours staring at a computer screen typing and calling people who don’t want to be called and being polite to people who can’t even spell the word polite. All in the name of expensive text books that I have to buy for a school with a ridiculously high tuition so I can get a job that pays well so I can afford to repay loans I had to take out for the school fee. Then when that’s done im expected to have children to prepare the next generation’s workforce and the cycle continues.
Who the hell invented work? Why cant we plant trees and trade berries? Okay that’s a lie I really don’t mind work I just wish it wasn’t so uptight. Like… everything about the work process is so … ugh. First you have to pick out clothes from days in advance, make sure they’re office appropriate, iron them, wake up at ungodly hours to eat and get dressed. Get to the office where there is a clearcut hierarchy of who’s important and who… does all the work for little or nothing.

Stay in line because if you don’t you run the risk of losing your job and you really need it!